It means nothing. Had a permanent position in a big Portuguese company and everyone in the whole team was working 12 hours plus per day.

Is uncommon to have people in Portugal working less than 40 hours. Tried to find a study to put some numbers in context of the reality I know. In the link Under "Duration of work" you can see that 78.6% of people work either 40 hours or more. http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/compara...

There's a big market of bodyshops over here (bodyshop, sweatshop, whatever you want to call it) mostly because the people in charge like to hire companies with consultants instead of perm positions. In those sweatshopts, sometimes there's stories of people pulling lots of hours (50+ for the big consulting gigs: accenture, deloitte, etc).

Personally, I've been working for 10+ years and I always follow the 8h. I've pulled extra hours when needed (who hasn't?) but never on a regular basis. In fact, the last 3 companies I've worked for are UK-based and I do 7.5h daily.

I don't know Portugal, but in Germany it's 8h too. (40h a week)

(8h work) + (0.5h to 1h lunch break) ~= 9h at the office.

Not much, i.e. there's no no enforcement of the law in practice.

Having said that it's not that difficult to find jobs where the 8h day is generally followed, and work/life balance in general is not bad.

Edit: to clarify a question that appears in other comments, those 8h do not include the lunch break, which is 1h.

It depends of the company, in a lot of places is really 8 hours but there are also some companies that you work 10h/day or more. Especially in the consulting area. Sometimes is just to show off, and people spend the time at their office doing a lot of things that are not work related.

This probably doesn't apply to "professional or managerial" roles